Leadership in Action: Profitability and the Common Good

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I have always suspected that leaders are more effective when they also envision themselves as learners. Somehow it is more difficult to be arbitrary, arrogant, or judgmental when we are looking for good questions rather than ready to give answers to whatever comes along. As we mature as leaders, we learn that even the right answer changes with context, and perhaps we become a little more willing to acknowledge the similarity of many human dilemmas as well.

It is more difficult to be arrogant when we are looking for good questions.

Robert Coles, the Harvard psychiatrist, had a good example of this in his 1989 book The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Houghton Mifflin). He talked about his early years ...